Well, no. It depended from the nature of the specific war. Invading Norway to annex that kingdom to the Empire of Scandinavia was quite different than planning an end run in Catholic lands to disrupt a crusade.
Yes, land wars were slightly different in that you didn't have to raise your fleets. But once you were committed to an overseas war, it made no difference planning wise whether you as, for instance, an English monarch, were invading France, Scandinavia or the Holy Land. It involved the exact same sequence of clicks. And the fact that you had to make a few extra clicks didn't really make much strategic difference in your planning either.
Planning should be more than just "do I make these clicks or not." It should involve actual decision making and weighing options, which the CK2 system really didn't.
Then you had "plan B": pause the game, raise the fleets first (you couldn't select them with drag-select if you had armies raised), drag-select the British ones and send them to a rally point. Then drag-select the French ones and send them to a different one (or the same if you wanted to concentrate your seapower). Done.
It may sound like micromanaging, but I actually spent more time in writing this than doing it in CKII. And it still was part of planning your war anyway.
It's still a process that has to be implemented every single war involving overseas travel (and realistically, your levies from northern Norway would have sailed to Oslo rather than marched through the Norwegian mountains, but no one was crazy enough to deal with all that extra micromanagement in CK2). And it's not "planning" if it involves no real decisions; you do the exact same thing every time.
Incidentally, if you hold down ALT while you are dragging and selecting, it will select ships instead of soldiers.
I guess that the lords of the time wondered about something similar.
Because they didn't want to deal with the expensive of paying for them, not because they were too lazy to do a couple of extra clicks. If you raise all your troops (which most of the time is how you would handle major mobilizations), they were raised and being paid for (either by money or vassal opinion) whether you used them or not unless you manually went around to all your islands and disbanded them.
They were not free (even if nordic, seafaring and worshippers with specific "seabound" beliefs enjoyed massive discounts). A single ship in CKII cost 0.45 gold/month. It doesn't matter who is paying for it: it is still gold being syphoned from your realm. If you don't need ships in CKII then you should lower those levies ASAP.
Vassals had no real problems developing their realms normally. They were generally limited by technology (which money didn't affect). The main impact was that they were less able to throw feasts/summer fairs/great hunts every year, which I don't remotely care about.
Are you sure about that? It always seemed to me that vassals rate of opinion loss was correlated to the amount they were paying for their raised levies. Larger vassals seemed to accrue the penalty faster and whenever ships were raised it rocketed up.
Almost positive. The big problem was that it was very easy to forget about some of your ship levies, leave them raised when you disband your main fleet/army after the war was over, and leave your vassal increasingly angry. But that was a UI issue (it could also happen with e.g. soldiers in Iceland or wherever, although there you normally noticed when you went to declare war and got a "you can't do that, you have armies raised" warning), not a ship issue.
